Are we ready to adapt to storage as a service?

Nearly 80% of all US companies are likely to adopt cloud-based storage by 2019 as they switch from on premise infrastructure allows for large reduced storage costs.

The Storage as a Service (STaaS) market in the US is expected to increase nearly $6 billion by 2019, growing at a CAGR of over 33% through 2019*.

While the volume of STaaS market today is not quite as high as the traditional markets- including cloud- is today, it is a market that’s poised for phenomenal growth.

As an analogy, who thought flash would outgrow the wildest projections and blow it out as it did now! So yes, there is promise and that’s pushing us to transform our delivery models to stay in pace with the rate of change.

Now what is STaaS?

It’s a way we deliver storage services in an environment with high levels of cloud pervasiveness – a reality of the times we live in.

Storage as a Service (STaaS) allows enterprises to lease their storage infrastructure to cloud service providers to store their business data, thereby reducing storage costs.

It is generally seen as a good alternative for a small or mid-sized business that lacks the capital budget and/or technical personnel to implement and maintain their own storage infrastructure.

STaaS is also being promoted as a way for all businesses to mitigate risks in disaster recovery, provide long-term retention for records and enhance both business continuity and availability.

The hidden costs of cloud-based storage - such as data migration costs, access fees, and portable device handling fees, are posing a challenge to this market. Organizations are having to factor in these hidden costs while formulating their business strategy.

Moreover, due to the complexity of the data, vendors are finding it difficult to maintain the infrastructure.

How will organizations take advantage?

The key to success is to put the customer in the center of this. Once you do that, you figure out where you can have the maximum impact.

We know that STaaS offers more cost-effective solutions to businesses; but scalability and resiliency are typically limited.

There are a number of companies, mostly start-up ventures that have adopted this modular design to develop purpose-built flash appliances to address some of the limitations of traditional and hybrid storage systems.

This class of systems does improve performance by introducing architectures built specifically to overcome legacy bottlenecks.

However, this approach poses another set of limitations, as the trade-off for customers is that they must accept another completely separate and distinct storage architecture into their data centers, and one that often asks them to compromise Tier-1 resiliency, rich data services, and that doesn’t take into account the impact that the introduction of flash has upon data protection—thereby creating an additional silo and adding complexity to the storage environment.

To overcome these challenges, IT needs a secure, seamless way to manage applications and data across clouds, regardless of their underlying data platforms.

When clouds are connected, IT is able to draw from the resources of each, move data and applications to new cloud services, and put every workload on the most appropriate platform, delivering the true value of StaaS.

Solution? A Data Fabric that is all pervasive and flexible.

A Data Fabric that affords IT the flexibility to choose the right set of resources and the freedom to change them whenever needed.

Just picking up one of the examples from NetApp STaaS solution built on NetApp Data Fabric offers a common foundational infrastructure for high availability and disaster recovery.

A single NetApp® Private Storage (NPS) deployment can serve multiple clouds, including AWS, Azure, and SoftLayer.

No data movement is required to relocate individual production applications from one public cloud to the other, eliminating the time, cost, and complexity of copying the data.

What I spoke of was one of the use cases. In practice, a true Data Fabric delivers on five major design principles:

• Control. Securely retain control and governance of data regardless of its location: on premises, near the cloud, or in the cloud.• Choice. Choose cloud, application ecosystem, delivery methods, storage platforms, and deployment models, with freedom to change.• Integration. Enable the components in every layer of the architectural stack to operate as one while extracting the full value of each component.• Access. Easily get data to where applications need it, when they need it, in a way they can use it. • Consistency. Manage data across multiple environments using standard tools and processes regardless of where it resides.

When a fabric delivers on these principles, it enables customers to increase efficiency, improve IT responsiveness, and ultimately accelerate innovation.

(*Research by TechNavio, a leading global technology research and advisory company with a focus on emerging technology trends)

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETtech.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETtech.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.

Deepak Vishweswaraiah is the Managing Director of NetApp India. He also heads the worldwide charter for Manageability Products as Vice President, Manageability Products Group Show more.. (MPG) at NetApp